She went to the great chest, hoping to find Orli’s laser in there. It was gone. So the room was not entirely untouched. Pernie glanced over her shoulder and also noticed that Orli’s tablet was not leaning next to the hourglass. She’d taken her technology.
Pernie crept down the stairs, listening intently for the sounds of anyone coming her way. No one was.
She came upon the landing that looked into Tytamon’s study and saw that the door was locked. The last time she was here, she wouldn’t have been able to get in there, but this time she had her power under her control. She leaned forward and peered through the keyhole, careful not to touch it, for she knew that such things were often equipped with magical booby traps.
She spotted a clear space on the other side, and, simply to prove that she could, she teleported herself inside. She turned all about, standing alone in the most forbidden of all places in Calico Castle, and she was exultant for it. She truly was a teleporter of Calico Castle now. Just like Sir Altin. Just like Tytamon had been. She finally was one of them.
She sighed as she thought it, though. She wasn’t really. They could teleport very far. All around the world. Altin could teleport all across the stars. She’d never teleport across the stars.
She opened her hand and looked into it, still holding the small mint leaf Seawind had given her. “All you have to do to return to us is tear this leaf in half,” he’d told her. “It is your choice. We will not come for you again.”
She had been more than happy to let them send her away after that, vowing never to return, still pouting some at having found out she couldn’t have Knot with her here. Oh, what fun it would have been to ride him across the open prairies of Kurr. No place on the island was open at all, only a few scarce beaches here and there, and those rarely even so much as a full measure long. She thought that perhaps even Knot did not know how fast he could go. She knew that she had grown stronger and faster with practice and training by the elves. She thought that maybe Knot could grow faster and stronger too, given enough room to run. She was sure he was already faster than any horse she’d ever seen.
But Knot was gone. She thought she most likely would never see him again. Which was fine. Once Master Altin fell in love with her, he would let her fly on Taot’s back. She was sure a dragon would be better than some old bug anyway.
Still, she sighed again.
She tucked the leaf behind her ear for safekeeping, and looked around the room. She’d never gotten to come in here before, only glimpsed it through the open door. It was even messier than she recalled, and it looked like a lot of Tytamon’s equipment had simply been pushed right off the end of the long table that he’d used all those years for a desk.
She heard voices coming through the window across the room, which startled her. With reflexes she’d long since stopped even thinking about, she whispered the words of her complex invisibility spell. She made her way quickly toward the window, stepping lightly over and around the assorted stacks of ancient artifacts and slipping easily between the carelessly arranged tables that angled here and there across the room. The first thing she saw was a big silvery thing sitting in the meadow beyond the walls. She knew immediately what it had to be. A spaceship! Seeing it made her even more excited to see who was visiting.
She had to stand on tippy toes to lean out far enough through the window to see down into the courtyard below, but see she could, and she started upon seeing who it was, as interest in the spaceship vanished. It was Master Altin and Orli, talking to a group of people Pernie wasn’t sure she recognized. One of them looked like the fun and funny Earth man Roberto, but if it was him, he was dressed differently than before. The familiar fleet uniform was gone, and instead he wore a bright purple coat with long tails and very torn and tattered sleeves. But he was the only one she might recognize. She was sure she didn’t know the rest.
Orli Pewter was crying, which Pernie thought was good. She would be crying when Pernie was done too.
Pernie reached down and touched her boot, making sure the little vial of Fayne Gossa was where she usually kept it. It was. Master Altin would never know it was Pernie that did it if Orli Pewter died that way, and in time he wouldn’t be mad at her and would love her instead.
She stood back upon her tiptoes to look down again. Master Altin was talking emphatically, and the way Orli Pewter was moving made it seem as if they did not agree. Pernie was glad of that too. She would always agree with Master Altin; he was a Seven, and he was the greatest wizard in all the land. Plus he had a dragon, which nobody else had. And he’d discovered outer space. And the moon.
Shortly after, the disagreement ended, and just like that, Master Altin disappeared. Pernie thought that was odd because he didn’t say anything or move his hands at all. He cast his spell like the elves of String.
She turned to go, intent on sneaking down to the dining room and waiting until Kettle set the table for them all to eat. Kettle always set the table, every night. And Orli Pewter would sit to the right of where Master Altin sat. Which meant Pernie knew exactly which cup to put the poison in. Then she could simply wait in the shadows until Orli Pewter was dead. She would teleport outside once it was done, and then hide in the forest for a week or two. Then she would “come home” and tell them about her first year on String. They would be glad to see her then, and Orli Pewter would be buried in the ground.
A movement in the window caught her eye.
She turned back and saw that there on the windowsill near where she’d been looking out was a little vase of some kind, or at least that’s what she’d thought when she’d first approached—not that she’d given it any real thought at all. But there it was, a fancy thing of glass, the sort of thing only a grown-up would want, boring but for the green spikes of a leafy-looking top, which was the source of the motion that she had seen.
She turned once more to go, but then stopped, and looked back at the vase again. It reminded her of something. She stepped nearer to it and examined it more carefully. Her little brow furrowed as she recognized what it was, or at least what it had been made to resemble with marvelous accuracy: it was a pair of twisted palm trees, just like those in the forbidden cove. The ones that weren’t supposed to grow anywhere else at all.
What a strange thing to find at Calico Castle. Djoveeve had told her that nobody could ever know about such things. She said that the sacred trees were an absolute secret that had to be kept from humanity. The old woman had made a big fuss about it when Pernie and Knot had chanced upon the grove. And yet, there one was, a miniature likeness sitting in plain view upon Tytamon’s windowsill.
She picked it up and gave the green spikes, obviously little glass palm fronds, a spin. They turned as easily at her touch as they had at the touch of the breeze.
She lifted it and held it up to the fading light coming through the window. There was some kind of gray-green liquid inside, the same color as the palm trunks in the cove. She thought that was a clever way to make it match the trees, but wondered why whoever made it didn’t just stain the glass. She’d seen glassblowers coloring vases several times when Kettle took her to the harvest festival each year, so she knew it was possible.
She wondered if it might be some expensive elven perfume. Djoveeve told her that the lady elves had a natural perfume that came out of their skin as if it were enchanted there, although Pernie hadn’t smelled anything when she saw the three of them in the waves. Pernie wondered if maybe this was such a thing, bottled up for humans to use.
She rose up on her toes and looked down into the courtyard where Master Altin had vanished. All the rest of them had moved inside the castle, it seemed.
She looked back to the forbidden-tree decanter and smiled. What if it really was the perfume of the lady elves? Master Altin would love her instantly!
She pulled the stopper out of the decanter and meant to take a whiff. But the moment she did so, the liquid inside vanished with a great sucking of air, much like the sound of someone who has just left by casting a teleporting spell. The decanter jolted her hand with the rapid evaporation, and then it was still and clear, not the least drop of fluid left inside.
She raised it to her nose and smelled it anyway, hoping for at least some lingering scent of the lady elves. There was no smell at all. Now she really wished she’d gotten close enough to the three of them so she could have smelled them too. But she hadn’t, so she set the decanter back on the windowsill. She replaced the stopper, shrugged, and headed for the stairs.
She found the people from Earth standing about the kitchen with Nipper, talking excitedly about something that had them all upset. Something about someone digging up some kind of new plant somewhere, or at least something that sounded that way. Pernie knew that Orli Pewter had done things to plants when she was on the Earth ship, and that her favorite thing was flowers and gardening and stuff. Pernie never liked gardening, and she hated it when Nipper and Kettle made her go out to the gardens and pick vegetables and fruit for supper all the time. They made her pull weeds sometimes too. Master Altin and Master Tytamon never had to do those sorts of things. And besides, plants were boring, which was why Pernie had always loved to hunt.
She watched as they talked, thinking her thoughts, when Kettle came into the kitchen from the big pantry where they kept all the most necessary stores. The sight of the flour-doused, red-faced woman made Pernie want to leap for joy, then tears came to her eyes so unexpectedly she had to turn and patter quickly down and out of the hall. She hadn’t expected that.
She wanted to run back and hug her, the only mother she’d ever known, the one person in the whole world who loved Pernie more than anything. She wanted to run in there so bad it hurt. But she could hear Orli Pewter’s voice coming down the hall, and that harpy’s screech put the scowl back on Pernie’s face. If Orli Pewter weren’t in there, she could have gone to Kettle, but for now she’d have to wait. This was the hunt. This was the one thing Pernie knew better than all else. And patience was everything.
She could imagine hearing Seawind saying those very words in her head, but she shook that away. She wasn’t going to listen to him anymore. But she would be patient. If she was patient, she would have Kettle and Master Altin to herself, and that would be the best.
Resisting the urge to go watch them again, to watch Kettle with her smiling eyes and gentle hands—except for spankings, but Pernie already knew that would never happen again—she slunk off into the dining room, where she took up a position in the dark corner beyond the armor that stood there like a statue all the time. It was the same place that Master Altin had appeared all bloody and dying that one terrible day. The day she had saved his life. Again. And the day that Orli Pewter had gone off with him to save some stupid planet, leaving Pernie behind. Also again. She thought it was a good place to wait, though she didn’t go behind the suit of armor all the way. She knew enough about teleporting now to know better than that, for he might think to teleport there again today.
She sat upon the floor contemplating how happy Master Altin would be to see her again, a few days from now, when at last she emerged from Great Forest with all the stories she would have to tell. She could tell him about the sacred horned manatee she’d ridden, even if only for a little while, and about the beautiful lady elves. She would tell him all about Knot too. She thought he would be proud of her for that, even if Knot wasn’t as good as a flying dragon was.
That’s when Kettle appeared.
Sure enough, just as Pernie had planned, Kettle came in with a tray of plates and silverware and began setting places enough to serve all those folks Pernie had seen in the courtyard and several more besides.
A strange young woman Pernie had never seen before came in behind her and helped to set the places too, which put a frown on Pernie’s face. That would have been Pernie’s job before. True, she’d always hated doing it, but she didn’t like having that other person doing it even more.
Still, between the two of them they got all the places set. Pernie counted eighteen in all, which nearly encompassed half the available seats at the table there. Pernie couldn’t remember seeing that many places set there more than a time or two, and both of those had come in the wake of the Earth people first arriving at Prosperion. It certainly seemed that the Earth people made everything change a lot. Especially Orli Pewter.
With that thought, Pernie decided to take her chance. She reached down and pulled the little vial of poison from her boot, then padded quietly across the distance between the shadows to the place she well knew Orli would sit, right at Master Altin’s right hand. She pulled free the little stopper and let go one single drop, the clear liquid falling out of her illusion spell and glinting diamond-like in the candlelight as it fell.
Pernie leaned over the edge of the table and peered down into the cup, making sure the drop wouldn’t be visible. The shadows were dark enough at the bottom of the vessel to hide it well. And no one would look into those shadows closely anyway. Why would they?
Pernie smiled and retreated back into her own shadows in the distant corner of the room and once more lay in wait. She wanted to watch Orli Pewter as she died, wanted to see her eyes blinking with surprise as she gasped out her last silent words, surprised by the unexpectedness of death like a dumb monkey or a dumb latakasokis.